Mercy may be freely given, but it quietly asks both people to become someone different.
Forgiveness has been seeking me out over the last few months, arriving through conversations, unexpected encounters and moments that, at first, seemed to have very little to do with one another before slowly revealing themselves to be asking the same question.
It has begun to feel a little like climbing underneath a weighted blanket at the end of a long day. At first you are conscious only of its heaviness, wondering whether the pressure is too much, before something in your body begins to settle beneath it and you understand that the weight itself is where the comfort lives. It is all-consuming without being overwhelming, and once it has wrapped itself around you it becomes difficult to think about anything else. Every conversation, every memory, every relationship somehow finds its way back to the same place.
A few weeks ago I pulled into my friend’s driveway…She had convinced me that kickboxing was exactly what two women nursing broken hearts should be doing with their evenings. She calls it our post-heartbreak glow-up activity, which sounds considerably more glamorous than two exhausted women trying to throw a combination at their feelings. I had pulled into the driveway to collect her when her mother came outside. I had met her once before in passing after tennis, sitting patiently while my friend finished playing, quietly working through a spreadsheet as though numbers were the only thing in the world asking for her attention.
This time she walked straight over to the car.
“Can I pray for you?”
There are very few occasions where someone offers you something that costs them time, asks nothing of you in return and still feels like an extraordinary act of generosity. I have never been particularly good at refusing prayers. I have always believed there is something profoundly hopeful about somebody choosing to spend a few moments asking God to be in your life.
She rested her hands gently on mine and began to pray.
She prayed for healing. She prayed for peace. She prayed that God would soften the places in me that had become hardened by disappointment and grief, and then she prayed that I would learn to love my enemies because bitterness leaves so little room for the life God is trying to build inside us. She echoed Christ’s words in Matthew, words that have always sounded beautiful when read from a distance and considerably more demanding when they arrive in your own life: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:44–45).
I drove away thinking about the people I have found difficult to forgive and the people who, with equally good reason, may never forgive me. What if forgiveness is less an emotion than a discipline; one that slowly teaches us to refuse bitterness, even when bitterness would feel easier?
What was Christ actually asking of us when He said those words?
Loving your enemies has never meant pretending they did not wound you, nor does it require abandoning wisdom. It asks something altogether more difficult. It asks whether you are willing to refuse hatred as the organising principle of your life. Whether you are prepared to keep seeing someone’s humanity even when they have forgotten yours. Whether you can continue believing that redemption and reconciliation remains possible because God has never withdrawn that possibility from you.
Forgiveness might be one of the clearest ways we are invited to resemble God because it asks us to love people without allowing their worst decisions to become the final word on who they are.
Within days I found myself thinking about the people we invite into our relationships, particularly in moments of crisis, and the extraordinary influence they can have over decisions that do not belong to them. Advice is rarely offered in a vacuum. It is shaped by the values, contradictions and unresolved parts of the person giving it. I wonder how many relationships have ended, how many friendships have fractured and how many people have become enemies because somebody else, carrying their own blind spots and hypocrisies, was allowed to become the loudest voice in the room. There are people who possess a remarkable talent for presenting themselves as deeply self-aware while offering counsel that reflects very little self-examination. By the time the consequences become clear, the damage has often outlived the conversation that caused it.
It made me wonder how many people we have decided are our enemies without ever discovering that the story we inherited was incomplete.
My phone, unsurprisingly, decided it had something to contribute. Within a day my social media feeds had become a rolling conversation about forgiveness. Pastors, therapists, psychologists and relationship coaches all seemed to have an opinion about forgiveness, and somewhere amongst the endless stream of advice there was one observation that stayed with me: forgiveness of other people is often impossible until we have forgiven ourselves for the versions of us that still make us cringe when we remember them.
That is why self-forgiveness is so difficult. There is no distance between you and the person who caused the hurt.
Last night I found myself sitting at dinner with a group of people when someone asked a woman, no older than I am, what the secret was to almost twenty years of marriage. The question was loud enough for everyone at the table to hear. She smiled almost instinctively and answered with a single word.
“Forgiveness.”
The simplicity of the answer made me smile. Twenty years cannot possibly be built without disappointment. Nobody remains married for that length of time without saying things they wish they could take back, misunderstanding each other, making mistakes, carrying stress home from work, failing to notice the quiet ways the other person is asking to be loved. Long marriages are probably held together less by never hurting one another than by deciding, repeatedly, that the person sitting across the table is larger than the latest mistake they have made.
Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:32). I have often read that verse as instruction for the person doing the forgiving, but maybe it also says something to the person receiving it. To be forgiven is not simply to be released from guilt. It is to be trusted with somebody else’s grace.
People often say forgiveness is for you rather than the other person, and while I understand what they are trying to communicate, I have never been entirely persuaded by it because it quietly removes responsibility from the person receiving that forgiveness.
To be forgiven is to be entrusted with somebody else’s grace. It is to know that another person has looked directly at the thing that could have permanently altered the relationship between you and decided that your future mattered more than your failure. That kind of mercy carries its own obligation. It asks you to become someone who honours the grace you have been shown, because forgiveness that changes nothing eventually becomes little more than permission.
I think about my best friend, who has somehow managed to know me through almost every version of myself without ever making me feel that my worst days were the truest reflection of who I am. We have never had the sort of dramatic friendship people assume is inevitable after so many years, and I suspect that this with forgiveness quietly doing its work. I wonder how many times she has listened patiently while I explained how I had managed to complicate my own life, quietly deciding that I was always going to be more than whatever mistake I had made that week. She rarely says, “I love you anyway,” but somehow I have always known she does. Instead she laughs gently and helps me gather the pieces of whatever I have managed to dismantle, or whatever has managed to dismantle me.
I think about my friends’ parents who have been married for more than 40 years, and I wonder how many ordinary evenings contained the possibility of becoming their last before one of them decided that this relationship deserved another conversation instead. I wonder how many apologies they have both offered that never made it into family stories, how many disappointments have been absorbed quietly because loving somebody for a lifetime inevitably means discovering every imperfect corner of their humanity and deciding, over and over again, that they are still worthy of tenderness.
The older I become, the more convinced I am that forgiveness sits at the heart of every relationship capable of surviving the passage of time. Marriages require it. Friendships require it. Families require it. Communities require it. Our relationship with ourselves requires it.
Perhaps that is why Scripture speaks so often about forgiveness. God was asking that we become people capable of offering it. He was also asking that we become people capable of receiving it with enough humility that it changes us.
I have a feeling forgiveness will keep finding me for a while yet.
It arrived through a prayer offered in a driveway, through conversations with old friends and former enemies, through the wisdom of a woman reflecting on two decades of marriage, through the unwavering love of my closest friend, and through the uncomfortable recognition of my own failures. Each encounter has reminded me that forgiveness is never simply about drawing a line under the past. It is about deciding what kind of people we become because of it.
The person who forgives is invited to become someone more capable of loving as God loves; someone who refuses to let bitterness have the final word. The person who is forgiven is invited to become someone who treats grace with reverence, understanding that mercy is not permission to remain the same but an opportunity to become someone different.
Forgiveness is an act of faith in two directions: faith that one heart is capable of releasing what has been done, and another is capable of honouring the grace they have been shown.
